Guns and butter
The
Museum of Piana
delle Orme

I
don't know if this
is the best museum of its kind in the world because
I've never seen another one like it. I had never even
heard of this one until quite recently. There
are a great number of fine, smaller museums in Italy
dedicated to single subjects: museums of the history
of farming culture, for example. You see rows of
period agricultural tools, old wine or olive presses,
an old tractor or two and probably some great old
B&W photographs—carefully
cut from private scrapbooks for the museum—of weathered old farmers bringing in the
sheaves. There are also a lot of military and war
museums, as there are in many countries—museums for
the army, navy and air force, or dedicated to this or
that conflict. It is rare, however to find all of that
in one place.
A
friend of mine drove up to the Piana delle Orme
musem near the town of Latina on the west coast above
Terracina, about 100 miles north of Naples. It's
not far from the Italian National Park of Circeo
(which is where Aeneas and Circe met, but that is a
different tale and museum!). He returned and said, "Eclectic?
This is nuts!" Indeed, you know there's
something strange going on when you drive up to the
grounds and see the sign at the entrance that declares
this to be an agricultural display, and right behind
the sign there's an F-104 jet aircraft! (photo, top
right)
Piana delle Orme means "Plain of
Footprints" (in the metaphorical sense of "historical
traces"). The museum describes itself as a
"museum of Italian Agricultural and Military History
in the 20th Century." It was started in 1996 by
Mariano De Pasquale (1938-2006), a floraculture
entrepreneur who took his share of the family farm and
made a fine living growing and selling roses. Sometime
in the 1960's they say he saw the wreck of an old US
Army jeep (this was the fiercely contested area of
Italy that led from Monte Cassino to Rome in 1944 and
1945), and that was that. He decided to
restore it and then caught the collector/hoarder bug.
(They tell me that quite a lot of museums started this
way!) He set out on a life-long quest to collect every
artifact he could find relating to the activities of
the local farming communities and of their lives and
experiences in peacetime as well as war: tractors,
artillery pieces, butter churns, toys, armored
vehicles...you name it. The gentleman passed away in
2006, leaving behind a seven-acre (3 hectares)
exposition ground that so-far includes pavilions
dedicated to
--period toys;
--the reclamation of the Pontine marshes in the
1920s and 30s,
one of the great land reclamation projects of
Fascist Italy (the
museum is, in fact, on that reclaimed land).
--period agricultural equipment;
--life in the fields;
--period war-time (WWII, mostly) vehicles and
weaponry used
by Italian, British, U.S. and German
forces in WWII in Italy.
--from el Alamein to Messina and Salerno;
--the Landing at Anzio;
--the Battle of Cassino
--Civilian use of leftover wartime equipment

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Besides the F-104 (obviously
post-WWII, but the displays cover some of the NATO
years, as well), there's also a Fairchild C-119, a
locomotive, a helicopter, and they are probably
hauling more stuff in even as we speak! There are
various life-size displays of infantry slogging along
next to authentically restored vehicles (image, above,
left); there is a fine collection of model aircraft, a
war-time first-aid station, and a memorial display to
the bombed-out monastery at Monte Cassino (image,
below right). Yes, the rubble is real; they went over
and got it and dragged it back to the museum. They say
you can do the whole museum in four hours, but you
can't. My friend
was right: “This is nuts!”
The grounds are laid out such that there are
very few barriers between you and the displays. You
can climb into some of the vehicles that are spread
around the premises. There are ample green spaces and
benches to take a load off whenever you need to—and
you will. There are audio-visual displays and a
strange store/trading post that will apparently let
you buy a replacement for that bayonet you lost—or
bring your old one in and haggle over a price. The
museum offers guided tours and is ideal for school
field trips and has a good restaurant—good in the sense of down-home farmhouse
cooking. Yes, that good.
By now the museum employs teams
of mechanics, restorers and other experts; after all,
many of the items on display had to be dug up from the
fields, hauled down from the mountains, or dredged up
from the beaches of Anzio. Needless to say, this thing
is threatening to get out of hand. I love it!
all photos by Piana delle Orme
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